new year
I.
happy new year—happy new light, new world—happy new edge, new realm—happy new haven!
a first letter to you in the next—
the place where nothing ever happens
(barely even bluffing ever happens), place where roughing,
rushing ever happens, like Aeolus’s empty tower.
a first letter to you from yesterday’s
homeland, now noland without you,
now already one of the
stars… and this law of leaving and left, cleaving
and cleft,
this claw by which my beloved becomes a name on a list
(oh him? from ’26?),
and the has-beens transform to the unhappened.

shall I tell you how I found out?
not an earthquake, not an avalanche.
a guy came over—just anyone (you’re my one):
“really, a regrettable loss. it’s in the Times today.
will you write an article for him?” where?
“in the mountains.” (the window opening onto fir branches.
the bedsheet.) “don’t you read the papers?
and won’t you write the obit?” no. “but—” spare me.
aloud: too hard. silently: I won’t betray my Christ.
“in a sanatorium.” (heaven for hire.)what day? “yesterday, day before yesterday, I don’t remember.
you going to the Alcazar later?” no.
aloud: family stuff. silently: anything but Judas.

II.
here’s to the coming year! (you were born tomorrow!)
shall I tell you what I did when I found out about—
oops… no, no, I misspoke. bad habit.
I’ve been putting quotation marks around life and death for a while now,
like the empty stories we weave. wittingly.

well, I didn’t do anything. but something did
happen, happened shadowless and echoless,
happened.
now, how was the trip?
how did it tear, did you bear, did it burst
your heart asunder? astride the finest Orlov racehorses
(they keep up, you said, with the eagles)
was your very breath taken, or worse?
was it sweet? no heights, no falls for you,
you flew on real Russian eagles,
you. we have blood ties with that world and with the light:
it happened here, in Rus, the world and light
matured on us. the rush is up and running.
I say life and death with a smirk,
hidden, so you’ll kiss me to find out.
I say life and death with a footnote,
an asterisk (a star, the night I long for,
fuck the cerebral hemisphere,
I want the stars).

III.
now don’t forget, my dear, my friend,
if I use Russian letters
instead of German ones, it’s not because
they say that these days anything will do,
not because beggars can’t be choosers,
not because a dead man is a poor one,
he’ll eat anything, he won’t even blink.
no, it’s because that world, that light—
can I call it “ours”?—it isn’t languageless.
when I was thirteen, in the Novodevichy monastery,
I understood: it’s pre-Babelian.
all the tongues in one.

anguish. you will never ask me again
how to say “nest” in Russian.
the sole nest, whole nest, nothing but the nest—
sheltering a Russian rhyme with the stars.

do I seem distracted? no, impossible,
no such thing as distraction from you.
every thought—every, Du Lieber,
syllable—leads to you, no matter what,
(oh to hell with the native Russian tongue, with German,
I want the tongue of an angel) there is no place,
no nest, without you, oh wait there is, just one. your grave.
everything’s changed, nothing’s changed.
you won’t forg—I mean, not about me—?
what’s it like there, Rainer, how are you feeling?
insistent, surefire, cocksure,
how does a poet’s first sighting of the Universe
square with his last glance at this planet,
this planet you got only once?

the poet gone from his ashes, spirit left the body
(to split the two would be to sin),
and you gone from yourself, you gone from you,
no better to be Zeus-born,
Castor ripped—you from yourself—from Pollux,
marble rent—you from yourself—from the earth,
no separation and no meeting, just
a confrontation, the meeting and the separation
first.

how could you see your own hand well enough to write,
to look at the trace—on your hand—of ink,
from your perch on high, miles away (how many miles?),
your perch of endless, because startless, heights,
well above the crystal of the Mediterranean
and other saucers.
everything’s changed, nothing will change
as far as I’m concerned, here on the outskirts.
everything’s changed, nothing is changing—
though I don’t know how to send this extra week’s letter
to my correspondant—and where do I look now,
leaning on the rim of a lie—if not from this to that,
if not from that to this. suffering this. long suffering this.

IV.
I live in Bellevue. a little city
of nests and branches. exchanging glances with the guide:
Bellevue. the fortress with the perfect view
of Paris—the chamber with the Gallic chimera—
of Paris—and further still…
leaning on the scarlet rim,
how funny they should be to you (to whom?),
(to me!) they must be funny, funny, from fathomless heights,
these Bellevues and these Belvederes of ours!

I’m listless. losing it. the particulars. urgency.
the new year’s knocking at the door. what can I drink to?
and with whom? and what indeed to drink? instead of champagne bubbles
I’ll take these wads of cotton into my mouth. there, the stroke—God,
what am I doing here? what auspices—what am I supposed to do,
this new year’s noise—your death echoes, Rainer, it echoes and it rhymes.
if such an eye as you has shut,
then this life isn’t life, and death’s not death,
it’s dimming, slipping away, I’ll catch it when we meet.
no life, no death, okay so some third thing,
a new one. I’ll drink to that (spreading straw,
strewing flowers for the 1927th thing,
bye 1926, what a joy, Rainer, ending
and beginning with you!), I’ll lean across
this table to you, this table so big no end in sight,
I’ll clink your glass with mine, a little clink,
my glass on yours. not tavern style!
me on you, flowing together, us giving the rhyme,
the third rhyme.

I’m looking across the table at your cross:
how many places on the margins, how much space
on the edge! and for whom would the shrubbery sway,
if not for us? so many places—our places,
and no one else’s! so much foliage! all yours!
your places with me (your places with you).
(what would I do with you at a rally?
we could talk?) so much space—and I want time,
months, weeks—rainy suburbs
without people! I want mornings with you, Rainer,
I want to begin the mornings with you,
so the nightingales don’t get there first.

it’s probably hard for me to see because I’m down in a hole.
it’s probably easier for you because you’re up on high.
you know, nothing ever really happened between us.
a nothing so purely and simply nothing,
this nothing that happened, so apt—
look, I won’t go into detail.nothing except—wait for the beat,
this could be big (first one to miss
the beat loses the game)—here it comes,
the beat, which coming beat
could have been you?
the beat doesn’t stop. refrain, refrain.nothing except that something
somehow became nothingness—a shadow of something
became its shade. nothing, that is to say, that hour,
that day, that home—and that mouth, oh, granted
courtesy of memory to the condemned.

Rainer, did we scrutinize too hard?
after all, what’s left: that light, that world
belonged to us. we’re a reflection of ourselves.
instead of all of this—that whole light world. our names.

how many times at my schoolgirl’s desk:
what’s beyond those mountains? which rivers?
is the scenery nice without tourists?
am I right, Rainer, rain, mountains,
thunder? it’s not a widow’s pretension—
there can’t be just one heaven, there’s bound to be
another one, rainier, above it? with terraces? I’m judging by the Tatras,
heaven has to look like an amphitheater. (and they’re lowering the curtain.)
am I right, Rainer, God’s a growing
baobab tree? not a Louis d’or?
there can’t just be one God? there’s bound to be
another one, rainier, above him?

how’s writing in the new place?
if you’re there, there must be poetry. you
are poetry. how’s writing in the good life,
no table for your elbows, no forehead for your strife,
I mean your palm?
drop me a line, I miss your handwriting.
Rainer, do you delight in the new rhymes?
am I getting the word rhyme right,
is there a whole row of new rhymes,
is there a new rhyme for death?
and another one, Rainer, above it?
nowhere to go. language is all learned up.
a whole row of meanings and consonances
anew.

goodbye! see you next time!
we’ll see each other—I don’t know—we’ll sing together.
happy land I don’t understand—
happy whole sea, Rainer, happy whole me!
let’s not miss each other next time! just write me beforehand.
happy new soundsketch, Rainer!

there’s a staircase in the sky, lined with Gifts.
happy new ordination, Rainer!

I’ve got them in my palm so they won’t overflow.
over the Rhone and over Raron,
over the clear sheer separation,
to Rainer, Maria, Rilke, right into his hands.

The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, created in honor of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, is awarded annually by Waywiser Press for a poetry collection by a poet who has published no more than one book. The winner receives $3,000 and his collection is published on both sides of the Atlantic. Mark Kraushaar is the 2010 recipient. He will be joined by this year’s judge, James Fenton.

Mark Kraushaar’s first collection, Falling Brick Kills Local Man, won the 2009 Felix Pollak Prize. He was the recipient of Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Award and two Wisconsin Arts Board awards for poetry and has been a finalist for both the Walt Whitman Award and the May Swenson Prize. His poems are widely published and anthologized.

James Fenton has worked as a political journalist, drama critic, book reviewer, war correspondent, foreign correspondent, and columnist. A winner of England’s Newdigate Prize for poetry, he is the author of several volumes of poetry. His latest work is Selected Poems. He edited The New Faber Book of Love Poems and D. H. Lawrence’s Selected Poems. He was an Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1994 to 1999 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and recipient of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

Excerpt from Third Street Muscles and Fitness*

…and for a moment, for a discrete, small portion
of what I will one day refer to as the past,
there’s the five of us facing three
double-door sized panes
of rattling glass:
rain on the awnings, rain over the windows,
rain over the gutters and rain
in soft, sparkling ropes along the curbs,
and into the drains and under the ground.
—Mark Kraushaar